


Five College Careers Alexis Castle Might Consider  (and the Consequences Thereof)

by Gray Cardinal (Gray_Cardinal)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castle, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles
Genre: 5 Things, College, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 19:25:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Cardinal/pseuds/Gray%20Cardinal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is it that the college you choose defines you for the rest of your life -- or that the life you choose will define the college you attend?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five College Careers Alexis Castle Might Consider  (and the Consequences Thereof)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sorcyress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorcyress/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Why Maine Is Such A Good Idea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22054) by [Gray Cardinal (Gray_Cardinal)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Cardinal/pseuds/Gray%20Cardinal). 



> Since college life often includes drugs, sex, alcohol, and romance; these things may appear in one or more of the following scenarios. Also note that the Castle/Beckett relationship fares differently in different segments, and that a death -- not involving a major character -- occurs in one segment.
> 
> “Five things” stories being what they are, some of these scenarios wander into AU territory, and all of them make assumptions about future canon developments that may or may not actually come to pass onscreen. Then again, that’s what the game is about....

**1 • Oxford (England)**

She’d first suggested it mostly to freak out her dad, but the more she thinks about it, the cooler and more fascinating it sounds.  Admittedly, it’s a long shot – they don’t take many Americans, especially as undergrads – but it’s, well, Oxford.  So she does the research, pulls together an application (totally not telling Dad or Grams about it, of course), sends it off...

...and gets accepted.  With a scholarship, even (that she doesn’t remember applying for, but hey).  And there is no way she’s turning down freaking Oxford.

At first it’s pretty much what she expects: the classes are fantastic, the food and the weather, not so much.  She finds herself in a House (capital H, kind of like a sorority, only not exactly) with about a dozen other international students – three more Americans, two girls from France, two from India, several from eastern Europe, one each from Hong Kong and New Zealand, all of them voracious readers, all with unexpected talents.  None more unexpected, though, than the Housemistress, who doesn’t bat an eye when Alexis walks into her study one morning and sees her floating, in the lotus position, a couple of feet off the floor.

After that, the classes get even more interesting, especially the seminar with Professor Giles.  Out of her housemates, only two besides Alexis actually go on to become Watchers, but by the time she graduates, almost all of them have picked up enough witchcraft to be useful in certain sorts of emergencies.

Her first assignment, as it turns out, takes her back to Manhattan.  She can’t tell her dad about her real career, of course, but the cover – assistant curator at one of the city’s smaller museums – is solid enough.  And she _does_ have permission to tell Kate, in the unlikely event that a situation goes far enough south to make it necessary....

Alexis successfully manages three potentials and one actual Slayer before going back to England for good.  She’s inheriting one of the three jobs from which Professor Giles is retiring – chief archivist for the Watchers’ Council.  She tells her dad she’ll be overseeing the Travers-Rosenberg Institute for Metaphysical Studies, which is true as far as it goes – but she tells Kate the truth, because she strongly suspects that her four-year-old sister Johanna is going to need a capital-W Watcher of her own one of these years.

Kate merely grins.  “Didn’t I ever tell you about the semester _I_ spent at Oxford?”

#

**2 • Reed (Portland, OR)**

She applies to Reed on a dare.  “You’re the queen of niceness,” Jillian says, “and it’s the world headquarters of weird.  They’d have to be nuts to take you.”  But they do...and while Jillian isn’t wrong, Alexis realizes something as she goes through her options.  Any of the schools she’s picked will stretch her academically – but out of all of them, Reed is the one most likely to challenge her worldview as well as her study skills.  And when she frames the decision that way, neither Dad nor Grams is in any position to object – though she can tell they both have reservations.

She understands those reservations better after the first two months.  The classes are everything she could want, but the dorm she’s landed in is – well, _eye-opening_ would be a world-class understatement.  There are drugs everywhere, in quantities and varieties that boggle the mind.  And while her fellow residents are totally cool about Alexis not being into their various substances of choice, Alexis is seriously conflicted about whether she can apply a “live and let live” philosophy to this aspect of Reed’s social culture.

It’s a dilemma she dodges by switching dorm assignments with a girl in her Shakespeare class.  The new dorm is quieter and very nearly drug-free; before long, Alexis has made a great many new friends.  And by the end of her freshman year, she knows a number of them in ways she has absolutely no intention of writing home to Dad about.  It’s amusing, really – though she will never, ever pursue the question, Alexis is morally certain she’s become more sexually adventurous than Dad ever was.  Which boggles her mind even more than Reed’s drug scene does.

Her housemates, being Reedies, also stretch Alexis academically.  In this case, that means encouraging her musical studies, so that by the time she graduates, her double major in English and psych has turned into a triple major, including music, and besides violin, she’s fluent in mandolin, dulcimer, and pennywhistle.  Also, the Celtic folk-rock garage band she’s been fronting for most of her senior year has its first CD out, and she has an invitation to audition for the Oregon Symphony.

After graduating, she moves onto the 28-foot sailboat Dad originally bought to go with his house in the Hamptons.  It had been docked and idle for ages, before she spent the summer following her sophomore year sailing it – with Dad and Kate – from New York Harbor around Florida, through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific coast, and finally inland to Portland.  She lands the symphony gig, working her way up from fourth to second chair over the next several years, while putting out three more CDs with the band before it splits up.

At which point Alexis weighs anchor and sets sail, becoming known up and down the Pacific Northwest coast as the fiddler Dread Pirate Jenny, mistress of the _Jolly Rodgers_ , liable to turn up at music festivals and seaport bars from San Francisco to Seattle at the drop of an eyepatch (and to have a lover or two, or at least some very good friends, in every port).

#

**3 • Columbia (New York City)**

Alexis has known for years that one factor, above all others, will determine where she goes to college.  So when her dad’s relationship with Beckett suddenly gets volatile in all the wrong ways right in the middle of her senior year, she calls in favors from the parents of two of her best friends to make dead certain that her application to Columbia will be accepted.  It is, of course, not the only acceptance she gets – but even after the Beckett situation appears to improve, it’s the only one to which she can possibly say Yes.  (She considers trying for Juilliard instead, but the combined odds of her actually getting in _and_ successfully keeping Grams out of the loop are just too high.)

She moves into campus housing, of course, since (a) commuting would be a total hassle, and (b) if she didn’t, Dad would figure out her real reason for staying in New York before her first midterms.  Her two roommates are easy enough to get along with, and Alexis settles in more quickly than she initially expects.  Classes are challenging, but not so demanding that she can’t spare evenings and weekends – some spent together with her dad, others spent worrying about him, as the dad/Beckett chemistry continues to waver between amusing and explosive.

Academics, in fact, are what keep her sane.  She chooses her major purely for her own pleasure: art history, concentrating on Italian Renaissance music and instruments.  It’s a discipline in which she can apply a variety of her skill sets: modest musical ability, solid writing, meticulous research, and (though she avoids admitting it to herself) a streak of deductive intuition worthy of a professional sleuth.  Alexis rapidly becomes a favorite of no less than three of her professors, routinely makes assorted honors lists, and before quite realizing it, accomplishes one of the rarest feats in all academia – not only does she earn her bachelor’s, masters’, and Ph.D. all from Columbia, the last of these is accompanied by the offer of a teaching job (indeed, the paperwork for the doctorate and the offer both arrive in the same overstuffed manila envelope).  It isn’t the only job offer she receives, either – there’s a small Midwest college with a tenure-track position, and a museum in San Francisco looking for an assistant curator.  But Alexis still can’t leave her dad to fend for himself, so she takes the position with her alma mater.

Columbia is delighted, and so are Alexis’ students.  By the time she retires, there is a Rodgers Chair in the art history department (the idea for which was _not_ her dad’s), she has – much to her own private amusement – been invited to give annual lectures at Juilliard, and no fewer than eleven books have appeared under her byline.  Three of these are widely used academic texts, seven are popular histories, and one, under a closely guarded pen name, is a moderately successful fantasy novel.

One thing hasn’t changed, though: Alexis is still alone.

#

**4 • MIT (Boston)**

“M-I- _where_??”

“T, as in Technology,” Alexis says to her dad.  “and M, as in Massachusetts.”

“Who are you, and what have you done with my daughter?”

Alexis laughs, and explains.  As Grams has pointed out in a discussion of possible career paths, Alexis has in fact had a career for years now – namely, managing a sizeable chunk of her dad’s household affairs.  “What you need,” Grams says, “is a supply of eager young geniuses with the attention spans of untrained puppies, who will be ecstatic to find someone in their midst who can actually organize the dull parts of their lives.  Major in whatever you like, just so long as you make yourself indispensable to as many of them as possible by the time you graduate.”

Put that way, her dad can’t argue with the logic, especially once he learns that MIT actually has a humanities program these days.  Alexis has no trouble getting into said humanities program – and she finds she has enough computer skills that she can actually keep up with a good deal of the conversation among the tech and science geeks that make up the dominant strain of MIT culture.  Also, Grams is right.  Most of the MIT student body is scarily like her dad – brilliant, but easily distracted by shiny things (although their definitions of “shiny” often involve math or physics she doesn’t even pretend to understand).  And they’re inordinately grateful to have someone around who remembers to order pizza, reminds them about doing laundry, and can actually find the notes they took six weeks ago at that guest lecture on computer forensics.  Better still, they’re polite about it, and a sizeable number of them are sharp enough to realize just how valuable her skill set is.

In fact, Alexis herself is intrigued by the lecture on computer forensics, because she recognizes the presenter not from his technical credentials, but from the jacket photos on his thrillers, some of which her dad has blurbed.  She says as much to Special Agent McGee after the presentation, and gets not only a business card but a specific invitation to look into internship programs at NCIS.  She keeps in touch with McGee off and on for the next year – and adds a computer security class to her schedule – but the internship she’s eventually offered is in a totally different part of the agency: Los Angeles, to be precise.  Alexis is doubtful about the position at first, but when she writes McGee about it, he urges her to go.  “Hetty Lange?  Is a legend.  Who doesn’t take interns.  Turning her down would be like Harry Potter not going to Hogwarts.”

So Alexis spends the summer following her junior year in L.A., and the two subsequent school years completing a degree program of Hetty’s design back at MIT. This nets her two diplomas, the third highest security clearance of anyone on the entire campus, and a full-time job back in Los Angeles.  Special Agent Callen immediately dubs her the Pixie, which is amended to “Ninja Pixie” after she disarms him twice during fencing matches and beats him five rounds out of five at laser tag.

The L.A. job lasts three years before she’s transferred back to Boston as Operations Manager of her own team of agents.  “Grams was right,” she tells Beckett one weekend, visiting over drinks.  “It’s pretty much like keeping Dad in line, only sometimes you have to use real guns.”

#

**5 • Bowdoin (Brunswick, ME)**

After the flirtations with Princeton, Oxford, and Stanford, Dad is a little surprised when Alexis settles on Bowdoin, and wants to know – repeatedly – why Maine is a good idea, especially when there are probably no five-star restaurants and getting there requires a twelve-hour trip that involves actual buses.

“Blueberries,” she says.  “L. L. Bean.  Fresh lobsters.”  More seriously, she observes, Bowdoin has quality academics, small classes, and has offered her a totally merit-based scholarship.  Dad rolls his eyes, bemused as always by his daughter’s practical nature, and puts her on the Downeaster for Portland.

She is back over Christmas break to play best girl at Dad’s and Beckett’s wedding, which is inevitably beautiful and hilarious in roughly equal proportions.  Afterward, she dives into her studies with an enthusiasm that surprises her; it is, she realizes, tremendously freeing to be able at last to leave Dad and Kate entirely to their own devices.  She dithers for a long time over a choice of major – “a little of everything” not being a practical option – before working out a double in English (because after all, everything begins and ends with words) and music (because sometimes, there are no words).  She makes a great many casual friends and a double-handful of close ones, but steers clear of serious romance in the wake of the disaster that was Ashley.  And though she insists she’s not going anywhere near the theater department academically, by the time she graduates she has somehow accumulated more stage-managing experience than a good many of the department’s actual theater students.

This last looks as if it may, in fact, turn into a career, as Alexis leaves Brunswick with a pocketful of theatrical contacts and recommendations, including several from the theater professors she wasn’t taking classes from.  But when she arrives back in New York, it’s to two pieces of shocking news.  The first is that Dad’s publisher (and ex-wife), Gina Cowell, has quite suddenly died from an unexpected illness.

The second is that Gina’s will leaves Black Pawn Publishing – one of the last houses in New York not owned by one of the Big Six – to Alexis.  It’s a very careful and specific bequest; neither Dad nor any of his lawyers and accountants are to get anywhere near the business side.  And while she can sell the business if she chooses, there’s a catch.  “Before you make that decision,” says the letter from Gina, “spend at least two weeks in my office first, so you know what it is you’re selling.”  The two weeks turn into three months before Alexis quite knows what’s happened, and before a year has passed the trade journals report that Black Pawn is prospering under its new leadership.  Dad is by turns immensely pleased (as the papers praise his daughter’s business acumen) and loudly cranky (at the very astute middle-aged male editor who’s now in charge of his novels), though the latter is mostly for dramatic effect. 

Meanwhile, the art-historian friend from Bowdoin she’s hired to do a survey and appraisal – Black Pawn’s assets, it turns out, include a very well furnished apartment in Upper Riverside – stays in Manhattan after finishing the job.  And showing Gordon the town makes them both realize that the friendship was, and is, more than that.  And so, one evening after they’ve seen an off-Broadway show: “Your Grams suggested I take you to _Beauty and the Beast_ .  Your dad suggested _Spider-Man_.”

“So you picked _The Tempest_ , why?”

“Kate’s idea.  You were best girl at her and your dad’s wedding here, right?”

“Right...”

“So where else should I ask the best girl in the world to marry me?”  And he produces a ring.

Alexis laughs and cries and accepts.  And lives, for the most part, happily ever after.

# # #

**Author's Note:**

> All of the above-mentioned colleges are real, but all details of academic life should be regarded as fictional or at least highly generalized – especially as the author has set foot on only one of the campuses mentioned, and that only on a very brief visit a very long time ago.
> 
> As the credits note, the events of the fifth and final section of this story bear a noticeable resemblance to a certain previously posted work. This has been done with the permission and blessing of the original author [waves], but should *not* be taken as any sort of official continuation of the series of which that story is a part.
> 
> Finally: given the nature of this story, readers are not merely permitted but encouraged to remix and spin off additional material based on any of the foregoing scenarios. (Just let me know when and where you post the results.)


End file.
